Professionalising Nigerian civil service (1) Writers are often considered ‘literary prophets.’ Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People preceded the first Nigerian military coup by seven months. William Shakespeare is no less prophetic. In Achebe’s case, we could say it was easy to diagnose the Nigerian predicament and forecast possible consequences. Shakespeare wasn’t a Nigerian, yet in Hamlet , probably his most popular tragedy, I see a deep analogy in Hamlet’s famous speech to the characterisation of Nigeria as a ‘hesitant’ reformer in the comity of reforming nations in Africa. ‘To be, or not to be,’ says Hamlet, while contemplating whether or not to commit murder. That is also the question for the Nigerian Civil Service in the 60th year of its existence. When more than 400 years ago, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet , Prince Hamlet’s question was a literary metaphor for deep hesitation; today, it connotes a deeper and more philosophical framework that surrounds conception and reality of what we want the Nigerian civil service to To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer/The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune/Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles/And by opposing, end them? The Nigerian civil service, since its inauguration in 1954, has been wading through its own ‘sea of troubles’ that has constrained it from rising up to the zenith of its historical mandate of mediating the social contract between the Nigerian government and the Nigerian citizens through the efficient and effective delivery of the dividends of democratic governance. Service evolution and progress have been characterised by series of disruptions, false starts, hiccups, misinterpretations, administrative misses and fortuitous breakthrough that make it very difficult for the system to achieve a critical rethinking and reconsideration of its base fundamentals. Prof. Ladipo Adamolekun gave an empirical backing to this historical demonstration of our reform profile since independence. In a 2005 survey of the reform profiles of 29 African countries divided into four categories, Nigeria qualified as a ‘hesitant’ reforming nation behind advanced reformers like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and committed reformers like Ghana, Cameroon and so on. When I completed my doctorate in 2005, I equally got a corroborating insight into one critical reason for the hesitant steps Nigeria has been taking in its reform efforts. That doctoral dissertation titled ‘The Nigerian Civil Service: A Framework for Reform,’ revealed a lot, basically the recognition of the dynamics that articulate the structural specifics underlying the needed reconstruction. Essentially, at the institutional level, I discover a real structural predicament which, with the benefit of my research practice, beginning with the doctoral dissertation, has continued to be the bane of the institutional reformation of the Nigerian civil service system since 1975 when systemic decay set in. My thesis revealed that there are too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little and too few people doing too much. The fact that my dissertation, later published as Public Administration and Civil Service Reforms in Nigeria, has entered into its third edition attests to the significance of this protracted structural predicament. In my new book, The Nigerian Civil Service of the Future (2014), I analysed this research finding into two significant imperatives which the NCS must address if its future as a world class institution is to be assured. The first imperative is the urgent task of professionalisation. The second urgent imperative concerns an urgent reassessment of HR functions as the fundamental basis on which a professional civil service can orient its capability readiness. The NCS doesn’t need experts. According to Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.’ What we need are professional managers; administrative leaders who are constantly motivated by the specifically local administrative predicament of Nigeria and the global knowledge framework to think, learn and rethink in order to evolve a world class institution that can deliver service as efficiently and effectively as any of its counterparts elsewhere. The challenge that the NCS confronts is therefore that of how it can metamorphose into a new public service supervised by those we have called the ‘new professionals’ who are aware of the modernising imperative the NCS must fulfill. In other words, how can the NCS calibrate a refreshing and globally compliant HRM architecture around which the reform of the institution can be facilitated? A new HRM architecture requires a strong, professional and adequately incentivised administrative cadre that will deploy creative and ingenious means to resolve the challenge of effective service delivery to the populace. Thus, reforming the civil service essentially involves rethinking our idea of who the civil servant is as well as a renegotiation of what constitutes his/her essential professional brief. This reforming framework was already pre-empted by the 1999 White Paper on Modernising Government by the UK Government. This sets out six key themes as the locus of the modernisation programme aimed at promoting a performance-oriented civil service: (a) stronger leadership with a clear sense of purpose (‘vision and values’ for departments; stronger central control of senior appointments, ‘360- degree feedback’ on staff performance); (b) better business planning from top to bottom (with all departments to have business plans with peer or outside review ‘cascaded down to personal responsibility plans’); (c) sharper performance management (with relative appraisal systems to identify poor performers); (d) a dramatic improvement in diversity (with targets to have more women and ethnic minorities at senior levels); (e) a service more open to people and ideas, which brings on talent (more interchange and outside recruitment); and (f) a better deal for staff (‘good conditions of service, meeting or exceeding best employment practice in the UK’ – a concession to tradition). It is definitely not a mere conceptual coincidence that the modernising imperative is hinged, first and last, on the image of leadership—a civil servant that understands the direction of effectiveness and efficiency, and s/he takes it! What then is a Nigerian civil servant? This question is not meant to refer to the ‘person’ of the civil servant who isn’t more human than the average Nigerian. Rather, it is supposed to address the ‘persona’—the role and responsibility—which the civil servant is supposed to be known for. And this has been the subject of many of the reforms which have attended the refurbishing of the NCS since 1954. Apart from the Foot Commission and the Gorsuch Commission that laid the foundations for the present Federal Civil Service Commission and the Establishment Branch respectively, the Nigerianisation Policy accelerated to fast track the national shape and dynamics of the newly minted Nigerian civil service. Its basic objective was the creation of a specifically Nigerian professional core of civil servants that would be saddled with the onerous task of nation building and national development. This policy was however undermined by many factors, one of the most significant of which is its subordination of merit to representativeness in appointment into the NCS, and the consequent fall in professional standards. By the time the terrible purge of 1975 happened, it was clear that the NCS was at the peak of its performance in the efficient prosecution of the civil war while it also has taken some wrong turns. The most significant of these turns, for me, were the neglect of the momentous administrative insights and reforms advocated by the Adebo Commission of 1971 and the Udoji Report of 1974. ‘To make knowledge productive,’ Peter Drucker says, ‘requires the systematic exploitation of opportunities for change.’ With the Udoji Commission Report, Nigeria lost a significant opportunity to exploit the managerial revolution and install a performance management system that would have impacted significantly on the question of what a Nigerian civil servant ought to be. The gradual but steady breakdown in manpower utilisation as well as vague job design and performance appraisal inevitably led to a general inability to recruit, retain and motivate adequate numbers of technical and professional staff as well as a gradual loss of professional and technical personnel from the civil service to other sectors as well as outside the country. If government fails to recruit and retain the best in the labour market, then how can it achieve the objective of building an HRM structure that will backstop its vision of a world class public service institution? Back to Shakespeare: To be or not to be? For 60 years now since the inauguration of the NCS, we have suffered the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ Isn’t it time now to ‘take arm against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, to end them?’ it took a while for Hamlet to resolve his indecision, and that came by chance. On the contrary, the Nigerian Civil Service cannot leave anything to fortune. From what point can we begin to undermine our hesitancy?
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 04:47:27 +0000
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